Plants consist of various organic components such as proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, natural products and metabolites. It is estimated that there are roughly 18 billion plant proteins in nature (assuming 400,000 plant species and 45,000 proteins per species). Even limiting to the roughly 20,000 varieties of cultivated plants, still yields 900 million proteins. This vast number presents a significant challenge to assaying for possible food applications, even using modern high-throughput techniques. To complicate matters, some of these compounds may be most useful in combination, resulting is a combinatorial explosion of possibilities. For instance, within the limited set of cultivated plants, there may be 405 quadrillion possible two-protein combinations and 121 octillion three-protein combinations.
Current food development methods fail to make use of satisfactory ways for efficiently screening the vast array of proteins and other compositions in plants for possible use as food ingredients. Such ingredients would be commercially useful in new or existing consumer food products. For instance, no aggregate data exist for use of plant components in food applications. Moreover, although there exist a broad array of molecular and functional assays that may be used to screen extracts from plants for possible use as food ingredients, many such assays are difficult to perform and simply cannot be feasibly used on a scale that would sample an appreciable fraction of the vast array of possible combinations of entities, such as proteins, from plants.
What is needed, therefore, are systems and methods for surveying the vast space of possible entities from plants, and for identifying desirable entities from such sources for food applications.